Is it just me, or does the combination of an hour-long research presentation and teaching a 75-minute undergraduate class seem like a bit much for a campus interview? I guess teaching other peoples’ classes is just karmic reward for cancelling my own classes while on these junkets interviews.

In other “interview follies” news, I’m currently playing email tag to arrange another phone interview for a one-year job in the Midwest. As it turns out, today is also a crunch day in the Spreadsheet of Death, with about a half-dozen application deadlines spread around the next week or so—my part in these applications is all done, but presumably this is the point where serious application triage begins at the recipients’ ends (and, from a self-interested perspective, where competing offers might be most useful).

Finally, my name showed up in an ad in the campus newspaper today; to my disappointment, I was not identified as a member of David Horowitz’s enemies list in the SAF’s full-page ad—instead I was merely being recognized as one of the honorees at this evening’s HOPE Banquet.

My inner debate for the evening: spend another three or four hours grading midterms myself (I’m done with the Tuesday-Thursday section’s, but still need to do the Wednesday-Friday section’s), or live down to my newfound reputation as being “horrible at getting back assignments to students on time”?

Then again, once the methods kids see their midterm grades that reputation may be the least of my concerns…

I have to say my favorite part of waking up every day is the opportunity to read headlines like “As schools court professors, Duke strives to retain them” in the Duke Chronicle.

On the bright side, at least I have on-campus job interviews… which is more than I could have said this time last year.

My email today included something that seems dangerously close to a teaching award:

Recently you should have received an invitation to the first HOPE Banquet sponsored by Residence Life and Housing Services. The celebration will be held on [redacted].

HOPE stands for Honoring Our Professors’ Excellence, which is the entire purpose of the evening. Each of our Resident Assistant and Graduate Assistant student staff members were offered the opportunity to nominate one Duke faculty member to be invited to this event. The students were asked to select a faculty member who has made a tremendous impact upon them, either inside or outside of the classroom. You were nominated as one of those faculty.

Between this and going to the Teaching and Learning Conference, I may be drummed out of political science (or at least the methods section) in short order…

While doing some work on a small project for the Director of Undergraduate Studies of our department, I stumbled across this course in the undergraduate bulletin and my first thought was “this would be a really cool class to teach.”

The news that the Duke-UNC game is available in high-definition on ESPNHD, but will be blacked out in Durham in favor of Jefferson Pilot’s craptacular standard definition broadcast (which, no doubt, will be poorly upconverted to HD on our CBS affiliate), has tipped the balance in favor of me watching House on Fox (in HD) at 9 rather than via TiVo delay.

This is one of those days I wish I were a Nielsen family.

Today’s Duke Chronicle reports on the results of Ted Roof’s latest efforts to dupe impressionable 18-year-olds into coming to Durham to play a sport other than basketball rebuild Duke’s football program on the recruiting trail, said efforts yielding (of all things) a pair of Swedes. As in kids from Sweden. I shit you not. I didn’t realize Malmö was such a hotbed of gridiron talent…

Meanwhile the best football player on campus is still pursuing the revenue sport Duke doesn’t suck at. Go figure.

It seems I spoke too soon; the financial powers that be apparently are unconvinced that keeping around a visitor to do something (teach sections of undergraduate methods) that perhaps a dozen or more of the department’s tenured or tenure-track faculty members are nominally qualified to do needs a bit more justification, particularly in the midst of a “budget crunch,” at least by “university that has more money than the Queen of England” standards. Nothing definite, but playing the odds in the presence of asymmetrical payoffs for misprediction seems like a bad idea at this point—potentially wasting hours of my life on applications beats potentially having to beg for a job at Best Buy or Red Hat, any day.

On the upside, a whole new vista of postdocs and one-years have been opened to me. Happy happy, joy joy.

Incidentally, I’m reminded of one of my favorite NewsRadio quotes: “You can’t take something off the Internet. It’s like taking pee out of a swimming pool.”

Modern computer processors have this feature called “speculative execution,” in which they try to guess which code path is more likely to be executed, and actually go ahead and execute that code before seeing which path is taken. This is a perfectly sensible strategy; however, if the prediction is wrong, the computer has to “undo” all that work and take the other branch.

Today I engaged in a little speculative execution of my own by putting in the paperwork to teach my (hypothetical) research methods class in the fall in an Interactive Computer Classroom. It’s not a huge investment by any stretch of the imagination, but every little commitment edges me down the path of spending another year in Durham. And given the state of the job market these days (and perhaps my generally picky nature), the chance of a branch misprediction seems rather low at this point.

Econ prof James D. Miller think colleges need to “fight” RateMyProfessors.com. I don’t know if it needs fighting, per se, but I’d say it’s only marginally valuable. For example, here at Duke I’m allegedly easy but at Millsaps I was easier yet was considered tough (and had the grade distribution to prove it—my classes were consistently below the college’s mean GPA).

That said, I don’t mind student-centered evaluations and have even lauded one effort to compile such things here at Duke, where the “official” evals for last semester are apparently so shrouded in secrecy that I still haven’t seen them 6 weeks after turning in grades. And I don’t even mind student evals in general, although they almost certainly were a factor in my failing upward in the academic universe.

Though, as a political scientist looking for a job, the mentality noted by this commenter (allegedly a faculty member in my field) is somewhat disturbing:

I have been to two academic conferences within the year (academic year 2005–06) where colleagues were running tenure-track job searches (political science) and when I made recommendations regarding two individuals who I thought might be a good fit for both jobs, I received subsequent emails that,“after having checked RMP” (talk about unprofessional behavior!!!) there were “concerns” whether either of the recommended colleagues could teach in liberal arts enviornment. Clearly RMP is being looked at by folks on search committees. Don’t believe for a minute that after having looked at RMP folks are not influenced by what they read. And don’t believe that search committee members are not going directly to RMP to, as I was told, “a snapshot” of job candidates. AAUP and the national associations for the various disciplines ought to step in on this debate and come down clearly on RMP and its use in job searches etc.

I ran into Nick and one of my devoted band of lurkers yesterday and was reminded that I have been insufficiently social this, er, year or so. So, in order to rectify that, I’m proposing the first annual “Hang Out With Chris and Watch the Super Bowl on his Spankin’ New HDTV Party.” It probably needs a more catchy title, but I’m working with nothing here.

If nothing else, at least it will serve as an excuse to clean up my living room.

Duke’s J.J. Reddick, quoted on himself and his friend, Gonzaga’s Adam Morrison, the leading contenders for the National Player of the Year award:

[W]e’re both competitors and we’re both really, really white.

You don’t say…

One of these decades, I’ll master the black art of taking photos with my camera phone. Until then, here’s the fruits of my labor—a scoreboard shot from the women’s basketball game after the Blue Devils denied Pat Summit her 901st win as a head coach on Monday night:

I actively encourage a Duke clone of these dweebs to waste a hundred bucks getting evidence of my (alleged) promulgation of radical left-wing views in class. Frankly, I’m sure some of my students would be happy to have the beer/pr0n money.

þ: Michelle Dion.

This may become an ongoing series…

• Doing the same lecture two days in a row is a bit (ok, highly) disconcerting the first time you’ve ever done it.
• Seminars are much less painful when you don’t do all of the talking.
• It will be hard for Duke University Transit to find a blue canvas bag you think you left on one of their busses when it has been sitting in your living room the whole day.

At the ripe old age of 30, I’m still learning new things; to wit:

• My car will not start if I don’t have the transmission in park.
• It is embarrassing when the AAA guy makes this discovery after you’ve been sitting in a parking lot for 45 minutes.
• Parking in the Campus Drive lot is impossible at 11 a.m.
• Trying to wet erase a purple marker from a whiteboard is not a good idea if you want your hand to stay flesh-colored.

It may just be the unseasonably warm weather, but the classroom I taught in today was somehow heated to around 80 degrees. That was a rather unpleasant experience, one I hope will not be repeated tomorrow.

On the other hand, there may be an upside to the heatwave.

Seeing your students covered in blue paint: meh.
Teaching late enough in the day that I don’t have to worry about students skipping: ok.
Getting a break from student emails: nice.
Dick Vitale’s microphone not working for the first few minutes: priceless.

Good luck trying to figure this one out on your own without asking the registrar’s office: WF pattern classes in Spring 2006 first meet on Friday, January 13th, not Wednesday, January 11th.

Good thing I put a slack day in my in-progress methods syllabus.

The average final grade in my research methods class this semester was 92.66% (an A-).

I am speechless.

Pretty much the most enjoyable thing I’ve done thus far on my birthday is spend 90 minutes reviewing for my methods exam with about a half-dozen students.

The least enjoyable thing was walking back and forth to East Campus when I realized about 30 minutes ago that I’d left the canvas bag with said exams in it on the damn C-1 bus.

Fighting with PeopleSoft to get my grades entered for the other class, watching a couple of DS9 reruns on TiVo, and breakfast at Elmo’s Diner appear somewhere in the middle of that hierarchy.

Prof. Munger makes a rare appearance in the blogosphere to recount his recent run-in with your Transportation Security Administration screeners (presumably) at RDU.

Part of an ongoing series.

I’m unsure whether to chalk it up to extreme diligence or just paranoia on their parts, but my students here seem to be atypically obsessed with their final papers and the (open book, open notes) final in my research methods class. I had at least 20 (of 33) students in a review session Monday night, I met with about a half-dozen today, and I expect to meet with at least another half-dozen tomorrow. It’s not a bad thing, just not what I really expected.

The functionality of wearing a thick wool crewneck sweater would seem to be defeated if two inches of your midriff are bare.